


Choir of furies in your head

by magpie_03



Series: Down the mountain range of my left-side brain [18]
Category: Twenty One Pilots
Genre: Depression, Epilepsy, Implied/Referenced Self-Harm, Loneliness, M/M, Seizures, Self-Hatred, Suicidal Thoughts, Suicide Attempt, Trigger Warnings, internalized ableism, joshler - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-04
Updated: 2019-12-04
Packaged: 2021-02-01 07:46:49
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,759
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21444709
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/magpie_03/pseuds/magpie_03
Summary: This one has big trigger warning for self-harm, suicidal thoughts and behavior. Please do not read if you are triggered easily.
Relationships: Josh Dun/Tyler Joseph
Series: Down the mountain range of my left-side brain [18]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/792015
Comments: 7
Kudos: 21





	Choir of furies in your head

It begins in December

It ends in December

Nobody tells you what the pain and the grief of trauma feel like. The fabric of fear transformed into an inner world, an artic landscape, silent, after a night of artillery fire. The ground littered with the shells of memories, blank and empty as bones.

Tyler doesn't remember much these days

The fear stays

The texture of fear, the fabric, tangible, like a veil that's been dropped in front of his eyes. Everything's grey, and it's not the December cold and fog. Everything loses color, he's falling out of touch with the world, with himself, and yet he's consumed by it, by his very own nothingness.

The fear stays

That feeling of being exposed to something vast, cruel and raw, exposed like a newborn in the snow

That feeling of staying on a tall building, at the very edge, swaying back and forth. Tyler is terrified by the drop and by his lack of control. He just wants this to be over, he wants it all to stop. He wants to go back but he's pushed forward and he's caught inbetween, swaying back and forth, terrified by the drop and the weight of his thoughts that are pulling him forward

_There are holes inside my mind where nice things are meant to stick_, he wants to say, or scream, or maybe just whisper, he needs to _verbalize his feelings _like he's been taught in therapy but nothing comes out. His body is filled with silence, there's nothing coming out of him anymore. There's nothing inside anymore except silence, a silence like weights that hold you down until you're far below reach. A silence that makes you stare off into space for hours on end and you can hear your parents ask _is everything okay, Tyler,_ their voices distorted

_I'm tired, I'm tired_, Tyler's pleading, he's tired of being pushed around by his body and by his brain but the word tiredness doesn't even begin to capture the exhaustion he feels after each week passes and it's been a bad week seizure-wise, mood-wise, the exhaustion and the panic, knowing that this will go on, it'll go on and on, a bad week and others are to follow because his condition is refractory, it's resistant to treatment

There are no words for this, for any of it

When you collapse on the bathroom floor in the middle of the night and you cry until you can't speak

You cry until you start to seize

And there's no one there except a choir of furies in your head

Laughing at the sight of your broken body

Crusted with tears catatonic and raw Tyler stumbles on

This isn't a journey or a battle, there's no destination, no aim

There's nothing to be learned from this, nothing to be gained

Tyler's sliding down a cliff into a silence that's bottomless and real

No one prepared him for it, for the isolation and loneliness of chronic epilepsy, of seizures, of depression, of not being able to leave the house for days on end, for weeks

For the hours that stretch into days, days that stretch into weeks, weeks that turn into months 

For time that's teaching him the difference between quietness and silence 

Between pain and violence 

No one prepared him for what it feels like to die, to wither away inside and you're forced to watch with your hands tied behind your back and your mouth taped shut

Loneliness, aciditic, black like bile

Tyler's skin becomes a ghostly white, almost transparent

The world reduced to all-or-nothing, and that’s not even a color, that’s just

Nothing 

Tyler becomes so lonely, so lost inside he starts talking to himself and his head responds accordingly

His knees fail

His brain fails

Words fail

There are lists now

One for getting through the day

Reminders for Tyler, handwritten by Josh when he can't be there and it's just Tyler and his mom or his dad for the day, to help him get through the next 24 hours

To help him remember to eat three meals, take his pills, take a shower, get dressed

Tasks that take the entire day, tasks that need to get broken down piece by piece

"You survived this hour, you're going to survive the next, okay?"

That's the mantra now

As Tyler's fighting his way through quicksand with weights tied to both of his feet

There's another list

One for forcing his body to stay alive

They're changing his meds again, they're introducing a fourth medication to help his brain calm down 

His parents squint at the medications, they've never been good with the drug's names

This is all his life has become

A mass of indecipherable syllables

Tyler turns his head sideways as Josh applies the cream his doctor gave him for the fresh scarring on his body

Josh's soft hands on his arms, legs, stomach and Tyler can't watch

He can't let himself process the kindness Josh offers in the face of _this _

This is all his body has become

A scrap of scarred flesh

If Tyler sits still, very still, he can still feel himself swaying inside

He's oversaturated, overmedicated

He can feel the medications sizzle inside his veins

Clawing at him, at the part that is still alive

Barely so

There's someone with him every day now and he knows why

It's the same reason why they won't leave him unsupervised with his medications

As if

Tyler knows the toxicity levels of his medications the way other people know phone numbers or birthdays

Nothing sticks these days except

Fear and death

Leaving Tyler empty and guilty at night 

His skin in the harsh bathroom light

He's pressing his fingernails into the soft flesh, flesh that's riddled with tiny half-moons

Footsteps that are leading nowhere

The will to live ghosting away

Tyler can feel his body getting dragged forward

His parents watch him like hawks, noting every twitch, every seizure, happy about the slightest decrease in seizure activity

Or any improvement at all

He can feel Josh's eyes over his body too, Josh who takes his hands when everything is too much, Josh who hums Death Cab for Cutie, Josh who is just there for him, againd again, and it breaks Tyler knowing that Josh will have to live with his absence

His parents and Josh have given him nothing but kindness and he's just getting sicker and sicker in return

He can't keep on going, not like this

Not when going to a concert with Josh and Brendon resulted in a hospital trip and somehow, _somehow_ a video of him seizing ended up online 

Tyler knew the video was uploaded before Josh said anything, he knew it in the glances Josh and Brendon exchanged when they picked him up from the hospital, and all it took were the first few seconds to bring it all back

His brain is vomiting memories, they're flooding everything else, making him slide and slither

The snickering and laughing is ringing in his ears, it's filling the room, it brings back people who have long vanished, classmates, ex-team mates, _friends_, Tyler used to think, but that concept is almost foreign by now

And they don't even need to push Tyler around, beat him up, film him, laugh at him, he can do it himself now, he's all grown-up, _can't you see, can't you see what you've done_ he wants to scream but no sound comes out of his mouth as Tyler throws himself against the walls of his apartment over and over again

His skin bruises in improbably lovely tones for a sadness, a self-hatred this sordid and sour

Violet, amber, bottle-green

The color of loneliness when words fail

At night, when Josh is asleep and his parents have driven home Tyler's fingernails scratch over the lock his parents installed for the cabinet that holds his medications

There's enough in there to kill a horse but not him

Cats have nine lives but you only live once, his doctor told him 

He's got one life but he almost died twice already

He's forced to live on, to watch 

He's scratching and picking the lock but the door won't give away and Tyler sinks to the kitchen floor, sobbing loudly

_Help me somebody help me help me_

Screaming, praying to anyone who's listening

But there's no answer, only the echo of an airplane traversing an empty sky

No answers, just the sound of Tyler's screaming reverberating through the house the next night

Josh wakes with a jolt and it takes hours before he can get Tyler out of it

Hours that drag on as they sit on the lino in their bedroom floor, their shadows intertwined as Tyler sinks his teeths into his arms, trying to find a place, any place, to bite, to tear, to hurt

Hours that drags on as the sky changes from black to grey to indigo to a soft pink

Like flesh that's been ripped off, leaving a gaping hole in its absence

Tyler's getting dragged along and he's losing his grip

He's been holding on for too long, he's out of breath

His thoughts have him gasp for air

Rattling coughs until his eyes water

His lungs are getting crushed with the conscious effort it takes just to stay alive

He starts to wander through the house

Despair keepig him up, despair because he wants it all to stop

_Somebody make it stop_

Locks that won't open

_Can't breathe, can't breathe, can't breathe at all _

_Somebody make it all stop_

As he makes his way to a busy highway that night, barefoot, in his jeans and t-shirt

He longs for silence, longs to lie down

On the road, with headlights blinking at him in Morse code

_Fear no more_

He doesn't think about his bones getting crushed on the street

All the longs to feel is weightlessness

Free from these thoughts that carry the weight of a car crash

His feet meet the asphalt, cold and unfeeling

The roaring of the trucks close enough to stop the screaming of his mind

He longs for silence

Longs to lie down, in the middle of the road

Just like that

Bones on asphalt

Until the the ground is littered with the shell of a memory

Tyler closes his eyes

There are headlights blinking at him but all he can see is a house with an open door

In the distance, not far away

It's windows glowing, blinking

Whispering

_Fear no more_

_Fear no more  
_

**Author's Note:**

> I am unwell. I'm trying to update the series as frequently as I can but right now I'm writing to survive what my brain is doing to me


End file.
